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> Posted by Center Staff
This edition of top picks features posts highlighting India’s financial inclusion progress and persisting gaps, how the deployment of digital financial systems requires strategic human capital management, and the state of the mobile money industry in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The proportion of adults in India with a bank account increased from 35 to 53 percent between 2011 and 2014, according to the recently-released Global Findex data. A new post on the IFMR LEAD blog shares the Findex findings for India, and outlines the ways in which financial inclusion in the country is still far from achieved. The post affirms that account ownership is just the first step towards inclusion, discussing account usage, gender disparity, and uptake of mobile services, among other topics.
> Posted by Center Staff
This edition of top picks features posts highlighting initiatives to optimize smallholder finance data collection and usage, efforts to improve youth financial capability, and insights on how mobile money services can effectively reach women.
To better provide financing for the 450 million smallholder farmers around the world, there’s a big opportunity in developing shared knowledge bases and coordinated learning agendas for this topic area. A new post on the CGAP blog shares the work of Dalberg Global Development Advisors and the Initiative for Smallholder Finance to ascertain the state of the smallholder financing knowledge base and put in place a number of complementary tools so that those addressing this financing gap can work together, repurpose what others have already learned, and build off of the field’s scarce resources to drive it forward. The post highlights a smallholder impact literature wiki, an interactive map of smallholder finance tools, a framework for data collection that includes a shared learning agenda, and new briefings offering supply and demand side insights as well as indications of where data is lacking.
> Posted by Center Staff
This edition of Top Picks features three posts that each bring attention to a type of financial service: cash transfers both unconditional and conditional, mobile money, and gold savings and loans in India.
- In “The Life and Death of Cash”, a new post on the Financial Access Initiative Blog, Timothy Ogden discusses recent developments in the area of cash transfer programs. After offering an introductory overview on common perceptions of physical cash in the development and financial inclusion contexts, Ogden contends that the advent in recent years of conditional cash transfer programs as well as program evaluations have increased support for cash transfers on the whole. The post cites two recently published cash transfer studies, and includes a Q&A with Chris Blattman, who is an author on both.
- “I believe in the inevitability of mobile money, but I don’t believe we’re getting there very fast,” Ignacio Mas states in a recent CGAP Blog post. In this post on mobile money and why its successes are disappointingly slow and isolated, Ignacio tables the limitedly optimistic popular mobile money dialogue to examine barriers to industry growth, on both the demand and supply sides. Among the points made, Ignacio posits that mobile money programs don’t fit within telcos’ long-established decision models, that the services run counter to banks’ traditional attitudes and approaches to client touch-points, and that users largely do not see their mobiles as a store of value or as an expense management tool, but just as one payment instrument. Read the rest of this entry »
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